BIOGRAPHY: Lydia Mayorova

Lydia Mayorova (1927-2008) was born in a village just outside Moscow on 16 December 1927. Life was hard at the time and got even harder when the Germans invaded Russia, only to be halted in December 1941 just outside the village where Mayorova lived. There was hunger and cold all around. In her memoirs, Mayorova recollected how the ink at school used to freeze over.

Mayorova's lucky break came in 1943, when the Russian state printers Goznak opened a college to train future employees in the art of engraving. She applied for a placement and even though she hadn’t had any artistic training to speak of, she was accepted. For Mayorova, it was like entering heaven: she was given new clothes and being fed twice a day. And the educational facilities at the college were of a high standard too, even though there was a devastating war on. The Soviet Union realised the enormous importance of this college, for many of the current employees in the printing business were away at the front and chances were the majority would never return. The state therefore made sure that the college was not lacking in any material. So there was an abundance of copper plates, burins and magnifiers to aid the pupils’ training.

The training course was comprehensive in that it entailed both art history and actual training, moving from engraving simple mathematical forms to ever more intricate subject matter, such as details of portraits like ears and eyes. While the art history focused firmly on classic great engravers such as Albrecht Dürer, Mayorova remembered being especially impressed by the work of the nineteenth century German engraver Gustav Frank.

The training took five years and during that time, many of Mayorova’s fellow students fell by the wayside, for many different reasons. In the end, only she and her fellow student Tatyana Nikitina finished the course. Mayorova’s diploma work was a copper engraving of the head of Michelangelo’s David. Years later, she would get the opportunity to revisit this subject, when she was given the chance to engrave the head of David for a stamp issue of 1975, marking the 500th anniversary of the birth of Michelangelo.

Both women were offered a position at the printing firm in 1948. By then, Mayorova had grown to love her work and her employers deeply and would remain true to them for the rest of her life. Not only would she work for them until her retirement in 1983, she would also return the compliment and educate a new intake of trainees.

What Mayorova would always regret, however, was the fact that for a long time in her career she and her colleagues were working anonymously. Security printing was very much seen as a team effort, with no personal and public credit encouraged or allowed. The employees were not even allowed to join the USSR Union of Artists. This meant that their work was also largely ignored in any art literature. Luckily, times have since changed and information about the designers and engravers of the various stamps, banknotes and other items is now publicly available.

Which is how we know that Mayorova’s first issued stamp was part of the 1952-1960 War Orders and Medal issue. This was an annually recurring series, which had been running for nearly a decade. Lydia got to engrave the 5 rouble value, depicting the Order of the Red Banner, issued on 4 April 1953.

Mayorova’s stamp engravings in the 1950s are few and far between. In those early years in her career, she was more often employed working on banknotes. The 1961 currency revaluation of the USSR, especially, stands out in her banknote work. The revaluation meant the production of new banknotes. When on a visit to Goznak, Premier Khrushchev was very impressed with the work done by Mayorova and especially with a bas-relief she had once made of Lenin. Thanks to him, Mayorova got to engrave the Lenin portrait on the new 10 rouble banknote, based on that bas-relief of hers. ‘Her’ banknote would remain in circulation for some thirty years.

From the 1960s onwards, the engraving of stamps would take centre stage in Mayorova’s career. Among the 80+ stamps she engraved in all, it is those which include portraits which Mayorova considered to be her best work. As examples she once noted the portraits of the actor Shchepkin (1963), Karl Marx (1967) and Field Marshal Suvorov (1980) as among her best stamp engravings. Of the non-portrait stamps she engraved, Lydia quite liked the 1966 stamp she engraved for the Russian set marking the 800th birth anniversary of the poet Shota Rustaveli. The stamp depicts a scene from one of his poems.

But Mayorova’s all-time favourite stamp is her penultimate one: in 1983, her final year as employee at Goznak, she engraved the portrait of the composer Aram Khachaturyan, for a stamp marking his 80th birth anniversary. It was a fitting triumph at the end of her career.

Lydia passed away in Moscow on 31 December 2008.

You will find Lydia Mayorova's database HERE.